The following relates generally to radioemission imaging. It finds particular application in conjunction with positron emission tomography (PET), and will be described with particular reference thereto. A digital PET scanner has several benefits in terms of image quality, but it is costly to design a digital PET scanner. For example, in one design there are over 30,000 crystals to build the illustrative PET scanner.
The crystal cost is a substantial portion of the overall PET system cost, and reducing the crystal cost would make PET scanners more affordable for less affluent medical facilities, such as those in developing countries. However, since each crystal corresponds to a detector pixel, reducing the number of crystals results in a corresponding reduction in PET detector resolution and hence a corresponding reduction in image resolution.